The Bottom-up model

During a meetup (dedicated to Agile France repetition), Luc Taesch has presented his Bottom-Up model.

He did so only after having given his speech on Agile transformation.

1. Why an Agile transformation can only fail when performed classically.

Luc first made us experimenting Dilts pyramid levels from NLP.

Identity

« Who ? »

Level that identifies a metaphor to illustrate identity and subject mission

Beliefs

« Why ? »

Level of beliefs and values, on ourself, on others, on life.

Capabilities

« How ? »

Level of competencies and organization.

Behavior

« What ? »

Level of actions being effective or not.

Environment

« Where & When ? »

Level of context in which the subject is living.

source : wikipedia (fr) – strangely, there is no page on Dilts pyramid on wikipedia in English.

Then, he sets the different hierarchic positions on those levels. His mapping is as below:

Identity

« Who ? »

Strategic Manager

Beliefs

« Why ? »

???

Capabilities

« How ? »

Operational Manager

Behavior

« What ? »

Proximity Manager

Environment

« Where&When ? »

Execution

During an agile transformation process, we generally start by forming an agile team and then by extending to other teams, hoping that will change the culture.

According to Dilts pyramid, we start from the bottom (environment, behavior). And the delay to climb up each step to the values is very very long.

Luc demonstrate also that no hierarchic level corresponds to the Beliefs step. Classically, Human Resources have taken the property for this step without other legitimacy than because it was empty.

To succeed into an Agile transformation, it is necessary to change the culture. So, we need to address both H.R. and strategic managers to justify this change of culture.

In start-ups companies, all those roles have lower boundaries. We can then change the culture more easily !

2. The Bottom-Up Model

His bottom up model is mapped on left brain-right brain duality. Luc shows how an operational minded organization has difficulties to go to emergence (agility case).

In MBTI, we consider that the best compliant profile for any organization is ESTJ, ST types being operational (left brain).

However in emergence, we mostly need their opposites, NF profiles (right brain), being more creative.

So it is more important to know how to swap between those left brain (process) and right brain (creativity) profiles.

Lean and Agile share a family link, human values. But we retrieve this duality Lean = improvement of existing and known processes (left brain) compared to Agile = creation of emerging products (right brain).